Food and Vegetable Choices During Weight Loss and Warnings Regarding High-Energy Foods That Can Cause Weight Gain

What foods should you eat while dieting? (continued)

Dishes

Continue eating your meals as usual, but reduce the amount of oil used in cooking. For example, instead of frying, stir-frying, or braising every meal, switch to stewing, boiling (or braising in water and oil), blanching, or cold dishes to reduce the amount of oil. If you used to eat a lot of meat, you can now reduce it to 50-100 grams of meat per day (50 grams of meat is equivalent to 4-5 pieces of braised beef the size of chestnuts), or 100 grams of fish per day (boneless weight). You can still eat a glass of milk and an egg as usual. If you want to build muscle during your weight loss period, you should add an egg and a glass of milk.

Vegetables and fruits

Because you're eating less staple food during weight loss, you need to fill the volume with vegetables. Therefore, the total amount of vegetables cooked with less oil should be increased, ideally 500-750 grams per day. Eat fruit as usual, but it's not recommended to exceed 350 grams (peeled and pitted).

Food selection tips

When choosing staple foods and foods like meat, eggs, and dairy, it's important to select varieties that are lower in energy and higher in protein.

For example, when choosing fish or meat, avoid fatty beef, fatty lamb, and pork belly, which have high fat content. Cooking methods include stewing, boiling, steaming, baking, and braising, while avoiding deep-frying. Boiled meat with a sauce made of soy sauce, vinegar, and minced garlic is also delicious.

Choose low-fat milk, skim milk, or yogurt for your dairy needs; avoid "thick milk" with a fat content exceeding 3.5%. Avoid excessive cheese consumption and sugary ice cream. When buying yogurt, pay attention to the fat and carbohydrate content; aim for no more than 12 grams of carbohydrates per 100 grams.

Eggs absorb oil very easily, so eat less scrambled eggs with lots of oil. Instead, choose boiled eggs, steamed egg custard, poached eggs, or soft fried eggs with less oil.

In short, most natural foods can be eaten during a weight loss period. As long as you can follow the above guidelines, you can maintain the diet long-term without compromising your health, gradually reducing fat, ensuring gastrointestinal comfort, and preventing mood swings.

Which are high-energy foods that cause weight gain?

Actually, I don't agree with labeling natural foods as "weight loss foods" or "weight gain foods," because whether or not they lead to obesity or help with weight loss does not depend on any single food.

During weight loss, you can eat all kinds of natural foods. Why prioritize natural foods? Because fresh natural foods bring us more vitality and are more beneficial in preventing many chronic diseases.

Natural foods have fixed components in specific proportions. Humans have become very familiar with these components through millions of years of evolution and know how to process them. However, with societal development, humans have transformed food into forms never before seen in nature, such as cookies, potato chips, and cola-products that didn't originally exist in nature. Food is increasingly deviating from its natural state. Faced with numerous non-natural foods, the human digestive and metabolic systems may not be able to cope effectively.

Just like cows are born knowing how to eat grass, their bodies know what to do after eating grass and what the consequences will be. But if you feed a cow cake, potato chips, or ham, its body won't know how to process these foods, and it's very likely that chaos will occur.

For example, while nuts and oilseeds (peanuts, walnuts, etc.) contain a lot of fat, they also contain a significant amount of protein, dietary fiber, vitamins, and minerals, which can create a feeling of fullness after consumption. However, humans extract the oil from nuts and oilseeds for frying. This oil extraction process results in the loss of protein, dietary fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Consuming a large amount of energy from cooking oil without obtaining the corresponding vitamins and minerals can cause bodily imbalances and does not produce the same feeling of fullness as eating nuts.

Therefore, try to choose natural foods as much as possible during weight loss. Fruits are what they are when they are picked from the tree, and vegetables are what they are when they are harvested from the ground. There is no need to juice them or make them into oral liquids.

Eating fruits and vegetables directly provides a greater feeling of fullness than drinking fruit and vegetable juices, making it more beneficial for weight loss. A balanced diet of natural foods makes it less likely to gain weight.

Fruit and vegetable juices are, after all, minimally processed products; at least you can still taste the fruits and vegetables. However, there are many more processed foods on the market today that are completely unrecognizable in terms of their ingredients. They often contain large amounts of oil, sugar, seasonings, and low-nutritional-value ingredients like refined white flour, all presented in an appetizing way. Such processed foods are generally fattening, and calling them "fattening foods" wouldn't be an exaggeration.

Sweet breads, biscuits, cookies, cakes, and similar foods taste good, are easily digested and absorbed, have a high glycemic index, are high in energy, and low in nutritional value. If you accidentally eat too much of these foods, you risk gaining weight. There are several reasons for this.

(1) Eating just a little bit will result in a lot of energy intake, which is difficult to control.

These types of foods don't require much chewing and are easy to eat, making it easy to overeat. For example, 100 grams of cake typically contains 360-400 kcal, while 100 grams of cookies, shortbread, or biscuits contain as much as 450-550 kcal. Most importantly, eating 100 grams of cake is incredibly easy; a few bites are all it takes to finish a piece of cake weighing over 100 grams.

In comparison, if you eat rice, porridge, and vegetables, consuming 300 kcal of energy will make you feel like you've eaten a lot and feel full; but a few biscuits or half a box of potato chips won't make you feel full at all, yet you've already gained over 300 kcal of energy. Moreover, many people can't help but finish a whole box of potato chips, which is even more tragic-the energy consumed won't be burned off even after running for 2 hours.

(2) High glycemic index is not conducive to fat breakdown.

These types of foods are either high in sugar, refined starch, or dextrin, or high in fat, and most are high in all of these. Such foods cause a rapid and high rise in blood sugar or blood lipids after meals. In this situation, the body has already obtained enough glucose and fat from the food, or even a surplus, so why break down body fat? This has a significant negative impact on weight loss. Foods like whole grains, beans, lean meat, and yogurt, which cause a slow rise in blood sugar and blood lipids after meals, are more conducive to weight loss.

(3) It has low nutritional value, cannot make the body full of vitality, and cannot maintain a high metabolic rate.

During weight loss, people consume less energy, but the body's need for protein, vitamins, and minerals does not decrease at all. In fact, more B vitamins are needed to effectively break down fat.

Therefore, the more you are trying to lose weight, the more you need to pay attention to the nutrient density of your food. You must be extremely careful with foods that are high in oil and sugar, high in energy, and low in nutrient density; don't be reckless. You can occasionally eat a little during holidays or gatherings, but it's best to avoid them altogether.

Conversely, some foods are low in energy, require careful chewing, are difficult to eat in excess, and are not easily digested and absorbed. Even if you eat more of these foods, the risk of gaining weight is relatively small. For example, you don't need to worry so much about the quantity of seaweed, mushrooms, and green vegetables.